9 - Blackness after the Renaissance

Summary

The Harlem Renaissance was a jumping-off point for establishing Black visual aesthetics in the US. Despite their lack of understanding of Black African history, Black intellectuals knew that control over the representation of Black people was a vital part of the effort for Black people to be seen by white people as humans. Images are at the core of US society in political and economic terms. Image is everything to a public that demands a spectacle. The image is also at the core of race issues and identity in general. Many scholars still struggle to define Blackness as we know that skin colour is only part of racialisation, and Blackness’s pejorative connotations are hard to usurp. In a culture that takes alien civilisations and appropriates them for commodification, Blackness becomes another genre of extraction colonialism.

Black plastic artists have responded in various ways to Blackness and Black African aesthetics. In the past, these artists relied on white supremacist narratives to envision Africa. Though things have changed and Black people have begun to see more significant inclusion in galleries, museums, and art awards, Black US artists still have a problematic relationship with Black Africa and how to represent Blackness in their work. Though some plastic artists like Kerry James Marshall and Kara Walker challenge and subvert racist imagery in their work without appropriating Black African aesthetics to make points about the social and economic status of Black people in the US.

It must not be forgotten that the narratives about the newfound societies were the result of the encounters of rude ship’s crews with a totally new and unexpected reality. At best they relied on the impressions of sailors and adventurers for whom the acts of pillage were the normal procedure (Pinto, 1994). The mythic “savageness” of native peoples, where “no activity of the soul” could be observed, was also reinforced by pirates’ reports of British ships with which Queen Elizabeth [I] sustained her fleet. [45] and her crown, as well as descriptions of traders, merchants, and eventually missionaries, whose motives and guilty conscience readily embraced popular explanations that helped put in place “a whole system of rationalization” with which colonial cruelty would be totally justified (Galeans, 1997, p. 41).

Images

‘History decays into images, not stories.’ In contemporary western culture, images are essential in all aspects of life.